‘Natasha—not knowing them, before or after, is always the point.’ He gave a sigh, rose to his feet and crossed towards her. In an awkward way, he laid his arm across her shoulders.
‘Natasha, don’t. We’ve been over this and over this a thousand times. She’s unimportant. They’re all utterly unimportant. They have something I want for five minutes, ten—and then it’s over. Done with.’
‘Done with? Not for her. Tomas, we’ve suffered for five years because of this. You put our son at risk—’
‘I know that now. I couldn’t foresee it then. Natasha, listen to me. I have always loved you—and I’ll go on loving you for the rest of my life. You’re everything I want, and you always have been—’
‘No, I’m not.’ She rounded on him, tears springing to her eyes, and her face white with distress. ‘I used to believe you when you said that; I don’t any more. You want me and you want my opposite as well. You always have.’
‘Briefly I can want that. I’m not unique in that respect,’ he replied, with a slight edge. He looked at her carefully.
There was a small tense silence, then, breaking his gaze, his wife moved away. ‘I’m not listening to this,’ she said. ‘I want to see her picture. I want to see what she looks like now. I want to see what it is you needed yesterday, when you love me so much and I give you everything you want…’
She pushed past him and picked up the sheaf of papers, scattering them in all directions. ‘Show me, Tomas. I know how thorough you are. I know there’ll be more pictures. You won’t have been satisfied with one that’s nearly six years out of date…’
‘No, you’re right. There’s a picture of her taken when she renewed her driver’s licence, about two months ago. The agency found it. It’s in that pile there. Look at that if you must. It will tell you nothing.’
She snatched at the pile of papers he had indicated, tossing aside sheets of print. Coming upon the right picture at last, he saw her face change. She gave a sharp intake of breath.
‘Is this a joke?’ She stared at him. ‘There must be some mistake…’
‘No. No mistake.’
‘But I know this woman. Tomas—you met her one day at the Carlyle with Angelica.’
‘I never met her. What are you talking about?’
‘Glasses. She wears glasses usually. Maria. The one who used to give me a massage before I went to the theatre—once a week, twice a week sometimes—’
Under her left breast, Court heard; he stared at his wife.
‘Oh, dear merciful God. She’s upstairs,’ she said in a low voice. ‘She’s upstairs, with Jonathan, tonight.’ He saw her face become blank with fear, then she turned and ran from the room. Court followed. Halfway along that narrow artery of a corridor, pain tightened in his chest. He slumped back against the wall, fumbling for his inhaler. When the pain eased, he began opening doors, calling his wife’s name. He found himself in a kitchen, where a machine threshed. He found himself in a laundry room, where a tap dripped in a white sink. He opened another door and brooms fell out at him. Then he saw the right door, the only possible door—a jib-door, small, wallpapered, disguised and well-nigh invisible.
He forced it back and began to mount the stairs. His wife began screaming before he was halfway up.
‘They locked her up,’ Frobisher said, coming towards the end of a ghost story familiar to everyone present except Rowland McGuire and Nic Hicks. She produced some mince pies, dusted with sugar and fragrant with spice, placing them in the centre of the table.
‘That’s why she still walks!’ Emily put in. ‘Confinement! She couldn’t be confined then—and she still can’t.’ She shivered. ‘That woman had a lust for blood.’
‘Em, please. I am telling this story. We will tell it my way, if you please. Now, shall I continue?’
Everyone at the table except Lindsay gave some form of assent.
‘As I was saying…The Conrad brothers locked their sister up—for her own safety, or so they told the staff. The room they kept her in is just under this one.’ She glanced down. ‘That apartment is a duplex—the only one in this building. The room was tucked away up some stairs, so no-one could hear her if she cried out. The Conrad brothers told everyone that Anne had left for Europe on a visit, and all of their friends accepted that…’ She paused. ‘Although there was gossip, wasn’t there, Emily?’
‘Indeed yes. Tongues wagged. The Conrad brothers were rich—and strange. So there had always been talk.’
‘Be that as it may,’ Frobisher continued, lowering her voice, ‘their precautions were to no avail. Every night, one of the brothers would stay with her; they took it in turns to do that. And one night, one of the brothers got careless…’
‘I heard,’ said one of the ancient women whose identities Rowland confused. ‘I heard that the brothers quarrelled and one of them let her out…’
‘Possible. In the circumstances, even probable.’ Emily glanced around the table. ‘They were all so very close…’
‘Either way,’ Frobisher continued, doggedly, ‘a fatal error was made. Her door was left unlocked. She ran down to that great drawing-room, in a white muslin dress…’
‘Blue, Froby. I always heard it was blue.’
‘White, Em. A white dress—in fact, a kind of nightgown—and her black hair all loose. She was a very beautiful young woman, no dispute about that. It was a summer’s morning. The shades were down against the heat, but the windows were wide open. There was some kind of struggle—the brothers tried to subdue her, or so they later said. She broke free of them, gave one last terrible cry, and she jumped. Or…’ Frobisher paused, giving the assembled company a dark glance. ‘Or, she was pushed. That possibility was whispered at the time…But pushed by whom? The elder Conrad twin? The younger? By both? History does not relate, alas. And naturally, the whole matter was hushed up afterwards. Though people did say—’
‘She was with child?’ Another of the ancient women asked, on a gentle, interrogative note.
‘Six months gone,’ Emily said, in a brisk way. ‘Six months gone, my dears. And her skull cracked open on the sidewalk right outside the entrance. Cracked open like an egg.’
Lindsay made a small sound. ‘Poor, poor child,’ said the third of the old women, glancing towards her. ‘Such a terrible thing. Tell me, Emily—was she truly mad, do you think?’
‘North north-west,’ quoted Emily in a sage way. ‘When the wind was southerly…And at what point did she become mad, if she did? One cannot be sure, since it was the brothers who took charge of the story afterwards. As is generally the way, of course.’
A silence fell in the room; a candle guttered; Lindsay felt Colin’s hand reach for her own under the table. Rowland stared fixedly at his plate. Nic Hicks, having been silenced by Frobisher’s story for the first time that evening, passed the mince pies, then took one himself.
‘A rat, a rat…’ he said, taking his cue from Emily’s quotation, and acknowledging this with a charming glance. ‘So, who was the secret lover? One of the brothers? Does history relate that?’
‘No, it does not,’ Emily replied in a huffy tone.
Nic Hicks never noticed when his knuckles were rapped; he pursued his point. ‘But what happened to the incestuous brothers? I’ll bet they came to unpleasant ends…’
‘You are correct.’
‘Fascinating.’ Hicks sighed. ‘You know, Emily, it reminds me of the first production of Hamlet I acted in. At Stratford—a million years ago now, of course. My salad days. I was straight out of drama school, playing Osric…’
‘Excellent casting,’ said Colin, under his breath.
‘Sir Peter directing, wonderful Hal in the title role, Gwen as Ophelia. She played her pregnant! Visibly so by the mad scene, and when she was brought in on the bier—well! Unmistakably enceinte. This very, very round belly—a huge gasp from the stalls. Ruined the graveyard scene—such a scandal! A cause célèbre, overnight! Letters to The Times, professors up in arms, the hairy feminists jubi
lant, needless to say…Of course, we were packed out every night…Six years later, when I was playing Hamlet myself, with Gwen as my Gertrude—terribly good, I thought—I said, “Let’s get our priorities straight. Concentrate on the prince. Honour the indecision!” I’ll never forget, on the first night, Trev said…’
‘Let me out,’ said Colin in a low voice only Lindsay could hear. ‘Please God, let me out now. I can’t stand any more of this.’
As he spoke, he suddenly remembered an intention disclosed in one of his Montana faxes. Unspeakable things! Gently, he released Lindsay’s hand. Turning to Nic Hicks with an expression of profound interest, he slipped his freed hand beneath the folds of Lindsay’s red skirt. He began to move it gently upwards. He could feel the top of her stocking, then the skin of her inner thigh, which was astonishingly smooth and soft. He sighed. Lindsay, who had spent the dinner shuttling between dismay and despair, became aware of the intent, thoughtful gaze of Rowland, seated immediately opposite her. She gave the straying hand a caress, then a small and desperate pinch.
‘I gave my daughter a Shakespearian name,’ said the quiet and melancholy voice of Henry Foxe, seated to her immediate left. ‘Marina. I called her Marina. Such a lovely name, I always thought.’
‘A beautiful name,’ Lindsay said gently, feeling pity wash into her heart. Henry Foxe had shown her a picture of his daughter before they came in to dinner. His daughter, dead a decade, was tonight much in his thoughts, he had said.
‘It’s a pun on mariner,’ Rowland said, making Lindsay jump. ‘In the play, that is.’
‘Is that so? I didn’t know that.’ Henry Foxe gave a small sigh. ‘Well, that would make sense. It’s from Pericles, my dear.’ He turned back to Lindsay. ‘Very rarely performed. I’d never seen the play, never read it. I did read it finally, when she was a little girl…’ He gave a small dry sigh. ‘Of course, as Mr McGuire will know, in the play, there is a happy ending. The daughter is not dead, as her father has believed. She has been rescued from the sea by pirates. So she returns from the dead.’
He paused. ‘It is a very moving scene, when the father and daughter are reunited, when they recognize one another at last. Such a strange play—a corrupt text, I believe. Am I right, Mr McGuire?’
‘You are. Yes.’
‘There are lapses elsewhere in the play—but that scene, I always feel, is most beautiful. The daughter sings to her father, you know, and of course, he begins to recognize her because she so resembles his dead wife…’
‘Their identities elide,’ Rowland said, his eyes resting upon Lindsay. ‘As is the case in many of the late plays, of course.’
‘Such a beautiful scene.’ Henry Foxe repeated, shaking his head. ‘Such language! One is robbed, in the modern world, of such language. That scene was my mother’s favourite in the entire canon. An unconventional choice. Perhaps that’s why I chose the name for my daughter. How odd. I’d never thought of that possibility until tonight.’
He gave another little dry sigh. Lindsay, pitying him, found she could think of no adequate reply. She felt her eyes swim with tears. She laid her hand quietly on his arm, and Henry Foxe, not looking at her, patted it. Lindsay rose, and with a few whispered words to Colin, left the table, finding she could no longer bear to be in this room with its eddying undercurrents, its ghosts and its griefs.
‘Hi, it’s Tom,’ said her son’s familiar voice. ‘Katya and I can’t take your call right now. But leave a message after the tone, and we’ll call back.’
Lindsay, sitting on the bed in one of Emily’s guestrooms, stared at the wallpaper. It was yellowish, old, and formal in its patternings. Some device marched away towards the corners, another marched upwards to the cornice. She had received no reply from Tom’s room when she called from the Plaza at eight; she had received the answerphone, less than an hour later, when she had called from this room before they went into dinner. This fact had refused to lie still in her mind ever since; all through Frobisher’s meal, she had felt an irrational and mounting anxiety—and the turn the conversation had taken had made that anxiety worse.
‘Tom, it’s me,’ she said, into the phone, trying to deaden the panic in her voice. ‘I left a message earlier. Darling, are you all right? I’m—I’ve been worrying about your flight. Tom, if you’re there, will you pick up? I know it’s late but…’
The machine cut her off. Lindsay replaced the receiver. To hear her son’s voice, yet be unable to speak to him, made the panic much worse. She rose and began to pace about, then sat down on the bed again, trying to calm herself.
Frobisher had piled everyone’s coats on the bed as they arrived. Lindsay could see her own new illicit black coat, a scarlet scarf that belonged to Nic Hicks, some terrible bristling bear of a thing that belonged to Emily, a moleskin cape affair that one of the three ancient friends had been wearing, and lying side by side, virtually identical, the two dark overcoats belonging to Colin and to Rowland. Lindsay looked at these coats and heard herself make a strange sound, half gasp and half sob.
Oh, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? she thought, rising again, and again pacing about. She looked at her watch, and found it was almost half-past ten. She tried to work out what time that meant it must be in Oxford, but her mind refused to do the sum. It kept washing back and forth in a mad futile way, seeing pain and problems at every turn. Oh why did Colin propose on the stairs? she thought, then, telling herself that the location was unimportant, her mind went rushing off in another direction. No matter what she did now, thanks to her past actions, others were going to be hurt. Was there some way of preventing that? She could see no such way, no route out. There would be some damage to Rowland, she was not sure how much, and there would be considerable damage to Colin. I must extricate myself, she thought. I must take action and I must plan. But she found she could not plan, because she had looked at the telephone; her anxiety for Tom had come surging back, and all she could think of now was the necessity, the urgency of hearing his voice.
Be calm, don’t be so stupid, she said to herself; these wild fears for her son, to which she had been subject often when he was a child, were absurd now. He was a man; he was grown-up; there were a hundred ordinary sensible reasons why he should not be answering his phone. Tomorrow, this fear would seem ridiculous, and thinking this, she went into the bathroom beyond, walked across its chequer-board floor of black and white tiles, and seeing in the mirror how white and odd she looked, splashed water on her face.
She looked down at the tiles and thought of how, when he was aged seven, she had taught Tom to play chess. He had been good at the game and he had been able to beat her, consistently, by the age of eight. Hopeless, hopeless, Lindsay thought, leaning against the basin; she had not been gifted with an analytic intelligence, and she conducted a chess game with the same foolhardy incompetence that she conducted her life. She always brought her queen into play too early; she could not understand pawn strategies; she neglected her knights, lost her bishops fatally soon, and always forgot to castle, realizing it would have been advantageous to do so ten moves too late. Precipitate in attack, devoid of defence, she thought, and a slow tide of misery rose up in her heart; she did not mind losing the game—she had never minded that—but this was not a game, and as a result of her foolishness, her lack of foresight, others would be hurt.
For that, she could not forgive herself. I must go back to the dinner, she thought, returning to the bedroom. She turned towards the door, turned back towards the telephone, then bent, and on a sudden impulse, picked up one of those near identical coats from the bed, and buried her face in it.
Swimming into her mind came a vision of her future: she saw herself, despite her best resolutions, continuing as before, her life a series of ill-planned expeditions. There she was, as she had always been—a poor helmsman, charting a desperate, erratic course across an interminable ocean, always believing that land would be sighted soon. At sea: the story of my life, she thought.
A sound came from
the doorway behind. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were in here,’ said Rowland McGuire’s voice.
Lindsay dropped the coat guiltily and stepped back.
‘I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just came for my coat, Lindsay. I have to leave now, and—’
‘You’re not interrupting. I was just trying to call Tom. I’ve been worrying about Tom for some stupid reason…’
‘You weren’t calling Tom then.’
‘No. I was—thinking.’
This remark met with a silence—a silence which clamoured to Lindsay. Rowland picked up his overcoat and slowly put it on. Lindsay, afraid to look at him, could feel the tension radiating from him. She hoped he would remain silent; she hoped he would speak.
‘I went to Oxford to see Tom yesterday,’ he said, finally, turning to look at her. He hesitated. ‘He’d left for Scotland, so I missed him. I—Lindsay, I went there because I had this fixed idea in my head that I had to ask Tom’s blessing before I spoke to you.’ He gave a sigh, looking away. ‘Now, I don’t even know why I felt that. I went as soon as I received your letter. Your letter was delayed, you see. At the time, it seemed important to do that. Now it seems obtuse.’
‘Rowland, no—’ Lindsay took a step towards him. ‘You mustn’t think that. Not obtuse…’
‘I really couldn’t have borne it in that dining-room for another second,’ he went on, in a quiet voice. He glanced towards the door, then rested his green eyes sadly upon her face.
‘I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I was trying to understand how much all of this was simply a matter of chance, accident—mistimings, especially on my part. I kept trying to convince myself that if I stayed, the timing might suddenly come right. Then—something someone was saying—I realized: better absent myself. I shouldn’t have been here. I shouldn’t have come to New York. My presence has already caused enough trouble for one evening, and I don’t want it to cause any more, especially for you…’
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